BROWN RICE
Forget the Oscars, they're lined up for the G-20. Who arranged this? The cameraman, perhaps. Toe to toe along a thin red line that can't be seen from our audience seats. Who's running the show? It's a conspiracy. It's PR. They're in it to foster world harmony. Yes, that must be it! Otherwise, an apple or a line a day keeps our psychiatrist away.
Everyone sing along. The chorus line begins near the post box by the bank. We'll see. It won't need to double back. Fluffy white clouds are murmuring dreams.
Before bagels and cheese, five years into this life and down by the San Carlos creek, a green scarab beetle humming. Across the bank a breeze from nowhere. A wisp of something unmailable to Atlanta or to deposit at the bank. The story bootlegs itself.
Christmas dinner, with relatives in versions of themselves, tripping over center stage. I see history is temporary, with prequels, and getting rewritten to outlive better stories, good to go when you're ready. Except down by the creek, where the silent forest speaks in tongues.
Rapping at the front door of the Winchester Mystery House. Rippity bap. This line a day thing is maybe a decoy, a red herring. Who in their right mind would quarrel with the improvement offered up by the Century Twenty One Theater? It's placement next to the Mystery House seems no accident. Just a natural sequel, a link in the chorus line to flummox shrinks. Let them argue affect, latency, and on and on.
People in the Post Office line feel the rumble of a passing bus, notice a single loose shoe string. But an exhalation of the redwood grove? Beetle clicks which have no place in line? There are Big Macs to chomp. It's a hard lesson.
Over the further edge of beaten metal, butterflies fade. A French horn dwindles. Or was it a passing train? Not that it's burnished, but simply no longer delicate. Read this and join Alice Underground, White Rabbit by leaps and bounds, sea waves crashing in silence.
Found in vacant corridors is a mural hidden from graffiti days, trapped in a toenail, yelling slogans. Wash tubs of the world unite!
Or start your day the G-20 way with a hearty breakfast of Smash, Crackle and Pop! They roll amicably off stage, tumbling back underground. The bubble machine is running out of gas.
On Saturday, history gave way to a haircut, dovetailing with regular sanity so carefully tended. Walking heads up with every hair in place. Strangers nod hello. Tuning the carburetor of my MGB happens in a special corner of heaven. The fossil world ticks on by, ignoring muffled explosions, all tuned to a pleasing purr. So tamed that nesting birds on city ledges bring home french fries for their chicks. The TV in the barber shop shows a blue sky, green grass, white plates for the baseball game, the ads blending deftly, all seeming as far away as Mars.
Milling around the Mystery House, all those people pouring out of Century Twenty One, and no customs stamp. Well, as we mentioned, let's take it a line a day.
Remember levitating on your bike for the first time? Magically gravity was suspended, no falling, the ascent from plodding to gliding. Who knows how it happened, how it got that way or right up til now, without thinking. There is the math of apples: one for you, one for me, one for the Wicked Witch of the Mystery House (it was slipped under the table in a wicker basket.)
Both ends towards the middle, there you have it. Poof! Then we have a flower stand. Don't ask from where. And on the roof, a fiddler crab is tossing back green globs of spinach. There. All the elements of a story, for which, if it made proper connections, we'd all be grateful. The toe bone connected to the ankle bone connected to Chapter three. Who wouldn't like that? Or as Einstein said, “God doesn't play dice.”
Of course along with all of this something very serious might happen. It would be too dry. Having nothing to say would disappoint. Which is how we get stuck with chapter Four. Just do it to earn pancakes for breakfast, spread with real maple syrup. There's a silhouette on the hilltop, a fashion having little to do with the fluoroscope in your shoe store that outlines toe bones on either side of commotions. Because what is out of sight is not necessarily out of mind, some fun can be had with this.
This may seem a metalevel fly swatter, I know. I would guess more interest shown in the farmer's windmill, slowly creaking. I feel the wind through my wide brimmed hat, which shades the glare of afternoon. And I smell damp wood by my seat at the creek, heels scunched under. In the city of glass elevators, people in open prisons gliding up and down, willing specimens soaring over streets filled with strollers, eyes down. Does it matter who's in the driver's seat? Somewhere, somehow you get pulled over. And of course it's unfair, a mistake. It was unplanned. But don't get pissed off. Keep your eyes on the wheel, out there in the middle of nowhere, with the GPS switched off.
Wherever it happens will be the same place within. Brown rice, unapologetic, rooted. No place, to skip a couple of beats, is everyplace. Can it be anywhere else? On either side are commotions, but knowing no eternity I'm my own granpa. Sometimes a grumpy granpa, when the mosquitoes bite.
The Winchester cuckoo clock goes whirr . . .cuckoo! . . .the bird goes back in. Time, for the curious, is rectified. Until, of course . . .
Brown rice and a line a day keeps the shrink baying at the moon.
